The path we travelled before

I have always been intrigued by the career trajectories of writers, artists, scientists and professors. Was it a life-long goal? A deliberate set of decisions or a random sequence of events? I posed this question to Frederik Logevall, a distinguished historian at Harvard University and a Pulitzer Prize winning author. He recounted a story about a TV series that he had seen when he was a young boy. It was a British documentary, titled World at War that aired in 1973. The movie had a profound effect on Logevall who remembers that after watching that film he knew that he wanted to become a historian. It is a 26-part series on the events leading up to and during the Second World War. Over the years it has been hailed as a singular achievement, relying on rare interviews, actual footage and an extraordinary delivery of the narrator Sir Laurence Olivier. Logevall encouraged me and my family to watch the series, if we could. Fortunately, it is freely available online (on archive.org).

Over the last month, my family and I have watched the series - one episode per night. There is something special about watching a movie made over half a century ago, about events that had happened thirty years prior. In a world obsessed with special effects, seeing original footage from the frontlines in eastern and western Europe, from Manchuria to the deserts in North Africa, from the edges of the Indian sub-continent to Islands in the pacific ocean, and hearing interviews of those who were part of governments and regimes, militaries and bureaucracies, felt original and authentic. There are interviews of officers who served in the Nazi regime and were close confidants of Adolf Hitler (including his personal secretary), as well as those who advised military and political leadership in the US, Japan, the UK, France, the USSR and dozens of other countries that got caught up in the conflict. Lord Mountbatten - a name not unfamiliar to many of us - also made an appearance in several episodes.

The series moved me deeply - not just because of the horrors committed in the name of grand notions of racial and national glory, but also because the senselessness of violence and the banality of evil. Soldiers, whether they were part of one side or the other, talked about how they have to live with the decisions that killed innocent people; people who had not done anything wrong and just happened to be born on the wrong side. Perhaps the hardest part is to hear the stories of civilians and ordinary citizens - in all countries on all sides - as they recounted how they lost their loved ones, lived in a state of anxiety and terror, and were victims of physical, emotional and sexual violence.

In the last episode, titled 'Remember', many of those who were interviewed reflected on the permanent scars on their bodies and their souls. One soldier commented that in a small Italian town, he came across an old man who seemed oblivious to what was happening. This soldier, when trying to explain to the old hermit what the war was about, was at a loss for words. The soldier commented that it was not because of his poor Italian that he could not explain what he was doing in Italy, but it was because he himself did not know what the war was about. He said had no idea why he was fighting in the first place. I have heard similar stories from my friends in Lebanon and other regions in conflict, who after years of conflict or civil war, one day wondered: what was this all about?

Everyone who watches World at War will come to their own conclusion. But watching it in a world defined by propaganda, nationalism and misinformation, I could not help but be grateful for those who choose to preserve the present for the future. In a world where the separation between fact and fiction is getting muddier, preserving the truth is a moral responsibility. So is asking our leaders and ourselves where we are headed, and ensuring that we do not take the path we have traveled before.